Word: cosmic
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PROBING THE COSMIC FIREBALL...
What makes it still more convincing is that an entirely different kind of observation--the long-standing search for lumpiness in the cosmic background radiation--now suggests independently that dark energy is real. The lumps themselves were first detected about a decade ago, thanks to the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. At the time, astrophysicist and COBE spokesman George Smoot declared that "if you're religious, it's like seeing...
...physics and from measurements of the relative amounts of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the universe, that protons, neutrons and electrons (the building blocks of every atom in the cosmos) add up to only about 5% of the so-called critical density--what it would take to bring the cosmic expansion essentially to a halt by means of gravity...
...turns out that an additional 30% of the needed matter most likely comes in the form of mysterious particles that have been identified only in theory, never directly observed--particles with quirky names like neutralino and axion. These are the mysterious dark matter, or most of it anyway. The cosmic background radiation itself began to shine when the universe was 300,000 years old, but the temperature fluctuations were set in place when it was just a split-second old. "It's pretty cool," says Tegmark, "to be able to look back that...
...case, new tests of these bizarre ideas will not be too long in coming. Next week a satellite will launch from Cape Canaveral to make the most sensitive observations ever of the cosmic background radiation. Supernova watchers, meanwhile, are lobbying NASA for a dedicated telescope so they won't have to queue up for time on the badly oversubscribed Hubble. And lower-tech telescopes and microwave detectors, both on the ground and lofted into the air aboard balloons, will continue to refine their measurements...